Western literature has always resembled a Family Compact: those on the outside clamour for entry, and those on the inside guard their privilege assiduously. The flipside of the literary parlour game debating who’s in and who’s out involves making up gripers’ lists of who’s outside but should be in, and what undeserving insiders should be expelled. A recent Huffington Post essay by Anis Shivani outing America’s 15 most overrated authors is only the latest example of this popular pastime. Only a week earlier Gabriel Josipivici published a similar piece in the Guardian attacking as overinflated the reputations of Amis, Barnes, McEwan, and Rushdie. In the wake of all the fuss – both essays raised a storm of interest online – subjecting the Canadian scene to the same critical scrutiny became a point of national pride.

Always willing to rush in where angels fear to tread, we have accepted this challenge.

The rules of the game were pretty simple. We considered living authors only. Some established track record was required (breathe easy, Vincent Lam, your time has not yet come). And the two of us had to be, if not in complete agreement, at least amenable to each other’s point of view. Though as it turned out, when the time came to compare names, there were few major points of contention.

Of course, the judgment of who is overrated and who is underrated will always be somewhat subjective, but we did manage to hold to a few guidelines. Overrated authors win prestigious literary prizes, receive fawning reviews in the national media, and are brand names, if not always bestsellers. The underrated (which will be posted tomorrow) are names you may have heard of but, if sales figures are any indication, we’ll wager you haven’t got around to actually reading them. Some have won prizes, but there isn’t a Giller- or a Booker-winner among them. Like a lot of writers, they got their start in the small press. The difference is, that’s where most of them have stayed.

And so, without further ado, here are 10 overrated Canadian authors:

David Adams Richards

Richards is a good example of an author, like the retirement-age Brits mentioned by Josipivici, who has kept at it long past his best-before date. Obviously he’s found a formula that works (in terms of critical and popular reception), and he’s just going to stick with it. The result has been a strident series of crude, reactionary harangues on the evils of modern, secular civilization. Degenerate city-dwellers, slanderous hypocrites, and anyone with a university education are lined up against God’s people – honest, stalwart, hard-working folk who are made to suffer the persecutions of the saints. Enough already.

Anne Michaels

Canadian critic Philip Marchand once quipped that poets should not write novels. While Marchand would likely be the first to admit that this sweeping generalization is not true in all cases, Anne Michaels’ two novels, both of which have been greeted with fawning critical accolades, strong sales, and award nominations, could be seen as validation of Marchand’s viewpoint. Stuffed to the gills with abstruse metaphoric language and self-conscious, sonorous prose, Fugitive Pieces and its ever-so-slightly less overwrought follow-up, The Winter Vault, are prime examples of Canadian fiction that is solipsistic, humourless, and alienating. Michaels’ novels are emblematic of what gets lauded as great writing in this country: florid syntax married to heavy themes, often having to do with some combination of war, loss, and memory. They’re the All Bran of CanLit: books that people read because they think they’re good for them, not out of any expectation of pleasure or enjoyment.
John Ralston Saul

At one time Saul’s career seemed so promising. The excesses of the surprise bestseller Voltaire’s Bastards were corrected in a wonderful little book based on his series of Massey lectures, The Unconscious Civilization, which was rich with profound and provocative ideas. Since then, however, Saul seems to have taken his anointment (by a surprisingly uncritical media) as our leading public intellectual a bit too seriously. What followed was a slide into increasingly vague, unconvincing, and repetitive exercises in nationalist myth-making. Leading, inevitably, to his editorship of Penguin’s dismal Extraordinary Canadians series, many of whose authors seem to have been culled from this list. Is there a Family Compact of bad writing in this country?

Douglas Coupland

Unlike most of the authors on this list, major award recognition has eluded Coupland (save for the token longlisting of JPod for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize). This has not stopped his army of fans and supporters from elevating him to the status of CanLit’s premiere ironist, a designation that would be more appropriate if his ironies were a bit less obvious and more penetrating. In a seemingly endless series of twee commentaries on our post-postmodern, brand-obsessed age, Coupland has delighted in lampooning consumer culture by tossing into his work everything from cutesy line drawings to the 8,363 prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000 – all as if Kurt Vonnegut had never put pen to paper. What Coupland’s apologists miss is that his lazy prose is every bit as self-conscious as that of Anne Michaels or Michael Ondaatje: he merely plays to the lowbrow end of the spectrum.

Erin Moure

Though it probably seems perverse to most people to think of a poet in this day and age being overrated, it does still happen. A few names suggested themselves for inclusion here, but Erin Moure gets the nod for being so prolific and so honoured. She’s been nominated something like five times for a GG (she won once), and shortlisted for the Griffin. She also demonstrates why people have taken to avoiding poetry so studiously. Cryptic without being particularly interesting, stricken with various political and linguistic theories, and barren of the sort of grace one typically looks to poetry to provide, it’s all too easy to take a pass on.

Jane Urquhart

The adjective reviewers and critics most often apply to Urquhart’s writing is “lyrical,” which should be sufficient in and of itself to secure her a place on this list. And it’s true that she shares with Carol Shields a habit of producing prose that has all its rough edges sanded away; Urquhart’s writing is refined to the point that all the life has been winnowed out of it. But more than that, her novels are emblematic of a backward-looking, geography-obsessed tendency in CanLit. “I think maybe landscape – place makes people more knowable,” says one of the characters in A Map of Glass. “Or it did, in the past.” This could be the rallying cry for many of the authors on this list, but it doesn’t make for terribly compelling fiction. Urquhart, like many of the writers here, would do well to bear in mind Ray Robertson’s admonition about “the literary value of not being boring.”

Michael Ondaatje

Surprise! What credibility would a list like this have if it didn’t include the absurd figure of Michael Ondaatje, our very own poet laureate of pretentious, purple prose, our king of cliché, a sorcerer who has improbably managed for decades now to pass off his distinctive brand of inert slop as somehow being possessed of a “literary” value only detectable by prize juries, time-serving academics, and a handful of supine reviewers. It would all be laughable if not for the catastrophic effect the grotesque inflation of his reputation has had on Canadian writing, particularly with the enshrinement of historical romance as the default mode for serious dramatic fiction. Truly both a tragedy and farce.

Joseph Boyden

One of a number of CanLit mainstays who produced an interesting collection of short stories, then followed it up with a couple of lacklustre novels. Boyden takes familiar CanLit tropes – war, the rugged North, Native lore – and filters them through a sensibility that is positively Hemingwayesque: he’s the testosterone-infused answer to Jane Urquhart. Both Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce would be more convincing if we didn’t have everything from Wacousta to Tay John to Lost in the Barrens already gracing the CanLit canon. And did no one notice that the Manhattan sections of Through Black Spruce read as if the author had researched them by watching reruns of America’s Next Top Model?

M.G. Vassanji

It’s hard to think of anything positive to say about one of Canada’s most honoured writers. At least with Vassanji there is less of the precious mannerism and straining after ersatz literary effect that characterizes Michaels and Ondaatje. Unfortunately, this is because Vassanji, aside from his comically stilted diction, is oblivious to the notion of a novel being informed by any personal sense of style. There are people writing prospectuses for mining companies who have more feel for the language. It’s doubtful one could find an interesting sentence anywhere in his work. Further proof – as if any more were needed! – that prize juries in this country have a lot to answer for.

Yann Martel

Like Coupland, Martel has not won a major Canadian award, although the Man Booker Prize is a fair substitute. He nabbed that honour in 2002 for his second novel, Life of Pi, a cutesy fable with a premise that owes more than a little to Brazilian writer Moacyr Scilar’s comic novel Max and the Cats (Martel may be the first institutional CanLit star of the Internet generation, where the line between appropriation and plagiarism is perilously blurry). He followed that up with the misguided Holocaust allegory Beatrice and Virgil, a book that became a bestseller despite savage reviews in the U.S. and Britain (Canadian critics, as is their wont, were more polite). Give Martel credit for this much: he is at least ambitious and is not unwilling to experiment with different styles and techniques. Unfortunately, to date his most successful stylistic experiment is his first novel, Self, which is, not coincidentally, also his least known.